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Bulk/Mass Electronic Mailing Process

Information and Educational Technology (IET) offers a wide variety of Email services. One of these services facilitates accurate and timely distribution of Bulk/Mass Mailings. The Bulk/Mass Mailing service is coordinated by the Email Postmaster's office. There are a number of steps involved in each request, and the Postmaster Office makes sure that all steps of the process are complete and correct. This insures that when messages are sent out, they conform to the guidelines of the Mass Electronic Messaging Policy (http://manuals.ucdavis.edu/ppm/310/310-18.htm).
When requesting help in distributing your intracampus mass mailings, the Postmaster's office will require specific information from you at the time of submission of your request.

Items needed to complete the request include:

A valid email address to use in the "From:" line (please remember that all delivery error messages will be sent to this address)

The text of the message. Currently we only process messages in plain text. The best text format for saving Word documents is MS-DOS Text with Line Breaks (*.txt).

The recipient email addresses to use for the request (currently there is no restriction on number of recipients).

Keep your message short and concise.

Include links to more detailed information.

Provide a clear subject line so recipients know what your message is about.

Don't include special formatting (Every email program handles special formatting differently, and some programs may display formatting incorrectly.)

According the Mass Electronic Messaging policy, all bulk messages must be approved prior to being processed. The approving offices are as follows: Office of the Registrar for student mailings, Academic Senate for Faculty mailings, and the Office of Administration for staff mailings.

One important step in this process is the review of the Bulk/Mass mailing message before transmission. The Postmaster's office will provide the requestor with a test copy of the final draft of the message, exactly as it will appear to all recipients, and requests that you review and approve this test copy of the message before the Bulk/Mass mailing message is actually sent. The Postmaster's office also sends that test message to several other reviewers within IET to verify the format of the message using various email clients including Eudora, Geckomail, Outlook and Pine.

Another important step of the Bulk/Mass mailing process is to verify the list of recipient addresses.

Once the message is approved for content and formatting, and the list of recipient addresses is verified, the Postmaster's office coordinates with IET's Data Center email system adminintrators to complete transmission of the message. At this point, the message will be queued on the campus servers for delivery. Actual delivery to the recipients depends on the size of the list of recipients and load on the servers.

For Email questions or issues, contact: ITHelp@ucdavis.eduFor Website questions or comments, contact: ietweb@ucdavis.eduLast modified: January 06, 2014. Copyright Regents of the University of California, 2006